PHILADELPHIA, PA
Franklin Square Capital Partners, a leading manager of alternative investment funds, announced the launch of its latest offering, FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund, an unlisted closed-end fund that invests primarily in global credit. The Fund seeks to generate an attractive total return, while also focusing on capital preservation, by investing in loans, bonds and other credit instruments of public and private companies, with a strong focus on the European and U.S. markets.
This marks the fourth fund launched by Franklin Square, which now manages more than $9 billion in assets. “Our goal at Franklin Square is to provide individual and smaller institutional investors with the same investment access and investor protections that larger institutions demand,” said Michael C. Forman, CEO of Franklin Square. “This new fund adds to our stable of endowment-style funds and provides our investors access to what we expect will be high-performing global opportunities.”
Among the Fund’s key investment strategies, FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund will employ an event-driven approach, focusing on companies that it believes are undervalued by the market. The Fund intends to take advantage of dislocations that arise in the credit markets resulting from impending corporate events such as mergers, acquisitions or corporate reorganizations. These events can create attractive investment opportunities when the view of the Fund’s managers differs from that of the general market.
FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund is sub-advised by GSO Capital Partners LP, the credit platform of Blackstone. Franklin Square and GSO / Blackstone have partnered on three other funds. Franklin Square selected GSO as the sub-adviser for its fourth fund in great part because of GSO’s successful track record in carrying out similar global, event-driven investment strategies for select institutional investors. By focusing on these investment opportunities across GSO / Blackstone’s global platform, FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund looks to create a portfolio that can generate high potential returns.
“We don’t rely on the market to drive the value of a security,” explained Doug Ostrover, Senior Managing Director of Blackstone and co-founder of GSO, who serves as lead portfolio manager for FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund. “We take an independent and proactive approach, leveraging our global reach to identify events that will unlock value for companies and our investors.”
“We see strong investment opportunities in global credit as long as you have the institutional know-how to identify the right deals and the optimal fund structure to take advantage of them,” added Mr. Forman. “With FS Global Credit Opportunities Fund, we are giving investors the ability to diversify into global corporate credit, which has generally outperformed global equities over the past five years and demonstrates low correlation to traditional fixed income investments.”